ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
The charge we submit to the insurance and the negotiated rate with the insurance are generally but not always completely made up numbers.
Don't care. Inform your patient.
Sometimes the insurance neglects to the pay the negotiated rate. Sometimes that changes with phone calls and appears. Sometimes it doesn't.
Don't care. Inform your patient of what you've agreed to and what you will be charging.
The charge to the insurance for a roughly 5k dollar procedure might be 50k. The insurance might pay 5.5k. Medicare pays 4.5k. If you pay cash you get to pay 5k, assuming nothing goes wrong.
Inform your patient of these things. You have the numbers. Just tell them.
If you have a cardiac event mid procedure and end up on ECMO the cost is suddenly 5 million dollars.
We've already discussed unknown unknowns. Not an excuse for not informing your patient of the known knowns and known unknowns.
What number do you tell the patient?
You tell them the information that you have. Preferably, "Here is what we charge, and here is the negotiated rate." You can add, "Things don't always go perfectly with the insurance company, but that is our information." You can add nice answers like you gave two days ago if you have some known unknowns.
am I supposed to go through all of this with a patient in my 15 minute appointment?
I don't care who does it or when, except that it should be before a procedure occurs, because you need to get informed consent first.
Is the average person going to follow this? What if they are medically unwell?
Don't care. Do it anyway. The average/unwell person might not follow some of the things you say when you're informing them of the medical costs/benefits in order to get informed consent. If they're unwell enough (or for example, unconscious) that you would feel it is acceptable under the ethics of informed consent to not inform them of the medical costs/benefits, you can apply the same analysis here.
You have to be exhaustingly specific about much of this.
I just have.
The insurance company may authorize something and decline it later. Certain aspects of the care (like a consulted specialist who is the only person in the hospital for that thing) may not be covered.
Inform your patient to the best of your ability. Tell them your plan, expectations, and what that entails. Things happen, just like how medical things happen on the table. That's not an excuse to refuse to even try.
Let's say you passed a law that says "a patient is required to get a sheet of paper with the cost, price, insurance charge, and so on for the median procedure of that type, and if you don't provide this accurately you get fined." Do you have any idea how expensive that would be to do because of how frequently these things change?
Good faith estimate. Details of what needs to go on the sheet of paper can be haggled over. I'm sure we can come to a compromise. I bet you can do that pretty easily. Sounds a lot more efficient than a lecture. Glad you're starting to come up with better ideas than having the head of billing personally show up and manually do every single estimate and talk to every single patient (but I do remember the prior catastrophization, which is why I'm feeling pretty good right now).
The funny thing is, if this sort of law actually got passed, I'm pretty confident you'd figure it out pretty quick. It's actually pretty simple compared to a lot of other things that happen in your industry and others. You'd stop swearing that it would take 24/7 365 bullshit (which is Obvious Nonsense) and just do the damn thing. Shit, I am intimately familiar with the scramble to implement EHRs. Sucked for a while, probably still some lingering unintended consequences. But you figured out a process and did it. Bottom line: I absolutely do not believe your catastrophization of what it would take. It's Obvious Nonsense.
EDIT: BTW, you don't actually have to convince me. You have to convince the people who are willing to shoot CEOs dead in the streets of New York City and those who are cheering for them.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
If the UK wants to make such regulations it will reap the same sort of benefits: no toxic chemical pollution or chinese crap botnets, but also no innovation in these respective sectors.
So, will you then make a prediction along the lines of what I asked for in the OP? Are you predicting that tech companies will pull out of the UK rather than either upgrayyyeding their security practices for the world market or going with a dual product (one version that doesn't make absurdly basic mistakes for the UK market and one that does make those mistakes for the world market)?
The debate is only on the magnitude of the effect.
And I claimed that being forced to not have default passwords will have an incredibly low magnitude effect on innovation. Do you actually disagree with this, or do we agree?
I don't buy chinese crap that spies on you, I tell people not to buy chinese crap that spies on you and I shame people who do so in my social circles.
I do the same, but clearly that is not changing much about the world. Have you succeeded in changing the world through your evangelism?
Hell, I've spent years of my life writing symbolic execution software used specifically to make edge devices secure.
Then I'm sure you will be pleased that this work won't be going to waste by someone shaving a few cents off of the cost of your product by putting a default password on it. Honestly, hearing this, I'm really not sure what your concern is. Is it that your company's "We're Actually Secure" marketing is going to be slightly less effective, now that the floor has been raised? Did you really think that such marketing was really of all that much value in the first place? @The_Nybbler thinks that it's completely a waste and that no one would spend one red cent more for your secure product. Do you think he's wrong?
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
Citation needed.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I can easily commit to saying that no major IoT startup success is likely to be based in the UK any time soon.
Bruce Schnier noted that California had already implemented at least the number one item. Do you think that this is enough to also say that no major IoT startup success is likely to be based in California any time soon?
No chinesium lightbulb maker is ever going to bother with formally proving their code is correct because they don't care.
I don't believe anything in this requirement is aimed at formal code verification methods. I don't think that's a requirement that is on the table anywhere, except for perhaps some niche customers (e.g., military/space). Probably not even at most "critical infrastructure" places that could blow up or whatever.
I mean, honestly, if that's about all you have to say for what results from this, that no chinesium lightbulb maker is going to meet a standard that hasn't been proposed and that some critical application spaces are going to pay for good stuff anyway, that's kind of a nothingburger? Like, abstract senses about Europe (not even the UK) and wild references to John Galt aren't really "concerns" that can be addressed in context of the very specific document that we have in front of us. It really seems like you just don't have any meaningful concern that we can investigate.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Russ Roberts talks about how inserting money into things can change the culture around said thing. The example he often goes to is that of day care centers. Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.
Prior to the fee, parents had a cultural incentive to try to pick up their kids on time. 'I would feel bad if I was late and the workers at the center had to stay later than planned.' After the fee, a person could reasonably believe, 'Well, they set the fee at a rate that appropriately compensates them for the trouble, so as long as it's worth it to me to pay the fee, everyone wins.' And so the culture around how people viewed their choices changed; parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time... and so late pickups went up.
There have been a lot of discussions lately about financial incentives to have kids. I'd like to finally share an experience I had recently with my wife. We were on a trip in the southern US, and we happened to be out at a restaurant for breakfast on a Sunday morning. The place was pretty busy, and there were a lot of families there with little children. These kids were pretty much all quite well-behaved, and the families seemed pretty happy.
...the sight of this was apparently a crying experience for my wife. Parents actually like their kids?! They're all able to enjoy a nice breakfast out and have just an all-around pleasant morning?! What even is this world?!
You see, my wife immigrated from Canada, where they pretty straightforwardly pay people for having children. The payments are relatively substantial. Her sister is a prime example. Sister doesn't work; sister's husband works a pretty low-paying entry-level job, without a whole lot of hope in sight for significant advances anytime soon; sister and her husband already have two children, will probably be having more. Wife basically thinks that sister is just an example of a phenomenon that she thinks is common in her home country - people basically treating their kids as sources of income.
When I told wife about Hungary's schemes that have been talked about here, she immediately started thinking about how people would game it, how they'd make choices to just barely satisfy the governmental requirements, and how it would change the culture around how people view these choices. She also has gobs of experience with how employees game out the parental leave time and unemployment and so on, so she knows the way these games will be played (she's already confident that many people make choices of how to space out their kids based on how much leave you get, then how many hours you need to work again before you become eligible for another huge chunk of parental leave; you can string along several years of barely working at all if you do it right). "So, around 28-29, every woman will be figuring out when the best time is to hit up a sperm bank, given their job situation and ensuring a high probability of it working prior to 30."
I'm not going to confidently predict that there is going to be some particular unintended consequence (e.g., maybe people who might have otherwise had more than one kid just have their "gov't mandated, sperm bank one", they hate the thing, and overall fertility declines). But hot damn am I sure that there will be some unintended consequences to the culture around having kids if people go to some of the extremes of the financial incentives talked about here. Like, yes, injecting money will produce incentives that will change behavior. Will the resulting behavior be something that we like? Ohhhhh boy. We're in for a wild ride. Mostly, I'm sort of just amazed that this group generally leans right and would be incredibly quick to point out the possibility of unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed by the left, but is relatively uncritical about possible unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed to increase fertility.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
This is a very common failure to think on the margin; it most typically shows up when people are discussing drug prohibition. Yes, we all agree that prohibiting drugs/CP/murder is not going to actually eliminate it. Some people are still going to find a way to get drugs/CP or to murder other people. These are known as "high-value users". There are some people who will go to extreme measures to get that next hit, get that next picture, or to kill that one bastard. They may do so even if we make the (potential) costs high. (Note that there are some differences in effect of increasing direct costs vs potential costs, though legal sanctions can affect both.)
You may personally be a high-value CP user. We have high-value drug users in these threads. I don't know that we've had high-value murderers in these threads, but they do exist. We may not be successful in dissuading you from pursuing what you value so highly. We may or may not catch you and actually impose the potential costs. The societal value of making such laws does not hinge on that. This has been known for centuries.
Setting aside the other possible justifications for punishing you, specifically, there is societal value in increasing the costs for others, who might have a somewhat lower-value on the behavior than you do, perhaps to the point that they simply choose not to engage in the behavior. This comes in the form of people thinking, "Yeah, I kinda like kids, but do I really want to go to all the trouble of figuring out these VPNs, cryptocurrencies, etc., and then still run the risk of getting caught? Probably not," or, "Yeah, I kinda like drugs, but do I really want to go to all the trouble to deal with the criminal culture, pay high prices, and still run the risk of getting caught or getting an adulterated product that may kill me? I guess I'll just drink some whisky," or, "Yeah, I super super hate this guy, and if anyone ought to get killed, it's him, but do I really want to go through the trouble of trying to plan out how to do it without getting trivially caught, yet still run the risk of something going wrong and ending up behind bars for the rest of my life? Probably not."
Some people will ask themselves those questions and answer, "Yes, absolutely," instead of, "Probably not." But in the meantime, we'll have a lot less CP, a lot less drug usage, and a lot less murder. For the few of you who go ahead and do it, we can figure out what mix of the other justifications for punishment will be most beneficial to you and society.
That's one of the rules I've already mentioned, and I've already discussed why it didn't really accomplish anything. Moreover, it didn't even attempt to do what you just proposed.
EDIT: Also, that report shows that 63% did comply entirely within that timeframe. At least from the standpoint of "can you do this", the answer seemed to be "yes" for the thing that rule wanted. They're reporting failure as failing in any component, so I'm sure that'll be cleaned up in a few more years.
Nah, man. They didn't ask for anything like you suggested. And two thirds complied fully within a pretty short time frame, because what they asked for obviously could be done. I'm sure in a couple more years, that number will be higher.
Just do it. Just do what you know you can already do. What you already admitted that you can do; it was a lie before when you said you couldn't. You already admitted that you do do from time to time. We've been through every objection, in detail. I've responded, in detail. You're all out of excuses at this point and are just resting on speculative claims that it could possibly take a modicum of effort. Boo hoo. Grow up. They're literally shooting your people on the streets of New York City. Others are cheering. Stop lying to yourself and to others. Actually inform your patients and actually get informed consent. You probably will like the haphazard results that will follow if you don't clean up your act less.
Do you think that this is enough to also say that no major IoT startup success is likely to be based in California any time soon?
Nah
Ok, cool. Then epsilon regulation doesn't instantly kill 100% of innovation.
I think we're talking past each other. This regulation in and of itself is a nothingburger. It's the tendency I'm speaking to, which is what was alluded to in the OP.
Regulation is a dynamic process, it never stops at one law and very few of its slopes are not slippery.
Well, then we can probably dig back into the history books to find the first actual regulation that was placed on the tech industry. Whenever it was, it was in the past. The complaint that if we have epsilon regulation, it will definitely be a slippery slope to infinite regulation was valid then, but we're past that threshold now. Now, regulation is a dynamic process; the question is whether this regulation is part of a slippery slope toward infinite regulation, or if it's actually mostly basic shit that everyone has already known they should be doing anyway.
In this house we discuss the Bailey, not the Motte.
I mean, no? It's literally TheMotte. And this betrays that your reasoning doesn't even follow the Motte/Bailey dynamics. It was:
So the motte-and-bailey doctrine is when you make a bold, controversial statement. Then when somebody challenges you, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, and say that was what you meant all along, so you’re clearly right and they’re silly for challenging you. Then when the argument is over you go back to making the bold, controversial statement.
If anything, you're the one who is making bold, controversial statements (that innovation will grind to a halt, that no innovation happens anymore in any other industry that has any regulation). There's nothing comparable happening in the other direction. What even is the Bailey that you speak of?
EDIT: Your Bailey seems to be "an epsilon regulation grinds innovation down to zero". When someone challenges you on this, you retreat to an obvious, uncontroversial statement, like, "Regulation is dynamic," but try to sneak in some not-fleshed-out argument about a slippery slope implying infinite regulation. When pulled back to reality, and you're challenged to engage with actually-existing regulation, you're actually pretty silent, unlike at least gattsuru, who at least engages with what's actually going on rather than fever dreams. Why isn't the vastly more reasonable view that you're engaging in a Motte/Bailey argument, while not being able to point to any sort of Bailey from the other side?
they are shooting people who work for insurance. The people who are the problem.
First, hilariously naive that you think you'll be spared if the anger boils over into something like regulation. Second, if you're going to claim that they're the problem, tell me how you're going to fix it. I don't want to hear you just complaining and finger pointing; I want solutions. How are you going to start cleaning up this mess?
Informed consent has nothing to do with price
Price is part of the costs/benefits. You are practicing medicine unethically if you are not properly informing your patients of the costs/benefits.
I also can't promise you a price or cost or charge before hand.
Not a strict promise. We've been through this. You know this. You know that you can do better.
You have yet to explain how providing more detail on cost, price, or charges adds any value to the system.
It is unethical to perform a procedure on a patient before acquiring informed consent. It's basic decency in business practice. It's good to stop lying to people and telling them that you can't do something that you know you can. I'd think in recent years, you'd be a bit in tune with the idea that if your profession is being seen as lying to the public, it can cause a significant reduction in your status and credibility. Conversely, if you start doing the basic thing, patients will have more faith in the medical system, believing that the market is operating more fairly and that they are not being overcharged for services. This fosters greater societal trust in the medical system and encourages broader participation in preventive and other health measures. Price transparency is an important component of many properties of markets. It can affect people's decision-making and allocate resources more efficiently. It reduces information asymmetry. It reduces surprises and the anger they generate. When patients know the cost of their treatment options, they can plan financially, leading to higher adherence to prescribed treatments. For example, patients who know they can afford the cost of necessary medications or follow-up procedures are more likely to stick with the treatment regimen, leading to better health outcomes. It speeds up price discovery, increases consumer welfare, and it can also be linked to encouraging innovation. The Nobel prize that Stigler got for this sort of stuff was looooooong ago.
You have yet to explain how doing everything you can to hide prices, lying to people, telling them it's impossible adds any value to the system.
The Bailey is "I hear about [extensive compliance] from my friends in literally every other industry ever. They still seem capable of operating."
This is a true statement about the world, not an outrageous claim, newfriend. You may be thinking that those words mean something other than what those words mean. What are you thinking they mean?
My own consistent position is that this regulation is a small advance that is inconsequential by itself but proceeds in a direction that is ultimately incompatible with innovation and that assenting to it is a slippery slope.
Great! We can surely then have a reasoned discussion about the nature of slippery slope arguments, trying to understand when they hold, to what extent they hold, and whether the premises required for them to have force are present here. I have never objected to the concept of a slippery slope arguments, but it does need some something behind it, otherwise it leaves us vulnerable to just any crazy extrapolation of anything in any domain. We probably wouldn't respond to, "Gay marriage is a slippery slope to marrying dogs!" with, "H-yup. All slippery slope arguments are perfectly valid and correct in all conclusions."
Not giving prices is more misleading and confusing. Hence the legislation efforts and assassinations. Stop acting like people are so stupid that they can't understand costs/benefits. Inform your patients, just like you do with medical costs/benefits, even though there is also a knowledge gap there, too. Stop practicing unethically.
Regulations impair things.
I'm hoping we don't go there, but you need to fix things. Ask the techies in the IoT space how just stomping their feet, refusing to do anything, and resting on, "Regulation is bad, m-kay," worked for them.
Increased price awareness does not help patients make decisions.
This is utterly false and is completely unsupportable. You couldn't imagine saying such a thing for any other industry, because it's nonsensical.
I'm glad that you had no problem with the entire rest of my list of benefits. Given that the only benefit you gave on your side rests on the assumption that everyone else is too stupid (a bad assumption) that you need to be appointed to keep them in the dark and make all their choices for them (which isn't likely to help, anyway; how are you currently preventing them from going to the hospital where they happen to end up with the bill for $300k?), I think it's pretty clear that your approach is not helping. It's hurting. It unethical. It's bad business practice. It's bad economics. There is nothing good about what you are doing.
NYT had a doctor apologist op-ed this morning. Hilariously skewed, of course, but they also disagreed with you.
As a young doctor, I struggled with this. Studies show this drug is the most effective treatment, I would say. Of course, the insurer will cover it. My more seasoned colleague gently chided me that if I practiced this way, then my patients wouldn’t fill their prescriptions at all. And he was right.
Costs matter. Inform your patients. Stop lying and saying that they don't. I've given you a long list of reasons; compared to your one, extremely terrible reason for doing what you're doing, the choice is clear.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I disagree with your assessment of what "being capable of operating" entails, as we have gone over already.
We discussed shale fracking. Now Space X, ozempic, Matt Levine gives tons of examples of financial innovation, we're damn close to self-driving cars, but the hol' up is the tech, not the regulation. The list goes on and on. I do not see any more content in your comment that is anywhere near suitable to claim that we can simply declare this "gone over already". If anything, you just dropped it, because your position didn't go anywhere.
Let's make sure we're on the same page here, so that we are at least confident that we're both actually really ready to engage the slippery slope question honestly, without leaving room for a retreat in this direction. Are other industries capable of operating with some amount of regulation? Not, "Is there a general sense of a regulation-innovation tradeoff?" We agree that there is. The straightforward statement that many other industries are capable of operating with some amount of regulation. Are you going to stick with the position that this is an outlandish Bailey? Or is it simply a true fact about the world, and we can shift the discussion toward slippery slopes?
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
SMBC gets this close.
I've been thinking about the Grossman-Stiglitz Paradox recently. From the Wiki, it
argues perfectly informationally efficient markets are an impossibility since, if prices perfectly reflected available information, there is no profit to gathering information, in which case there would be little reason to trade and markets would eventually collapse.
That is, if everyone is already essentially omniscient, then there's no real payoff to investing in information. I was even already thinking about AI and warfare. The classical theory is that, in order to have war, one must have both a substantive disagreement and a bargaining friction. SMBC invokes two such bargaining frictions, both in terms of limited information - uncertainty involved in a power rising and the intentional concealment of strength.
Of course, SMBC does not seem to properly embrace the widely-held prediction that AI is going to become essentially omniscient. This is somewhat of a side prediction of the main prediction that it will be a nearly perfectly efficient executor. The typical analogy given for how perfectly efficient it will be as an executor, especially in comparison to humans, is to think about chess engines playing against Magnus Carlsen. The former is just so unthinkably better than the latter that it is effectively hopeless; the AI is effectively a perfect executor compared to us.
As such, there can be no such thing as a "rising power" that the AI does not understand. There can be no such thing as a human country concealing its strength from the AI. Even if we tried to implement a system that created fog of war chess, the perfect AI will simply hack the program and steal the information, if it is so valuable. Certainly, there is nothing we can do to prevent it from getting the valuable information it desires.
So maybe, some people might think, it will be omniscient AIs vs omniscient AIs. But, uh, we can just look at the Top Chess Engine Competition. They intentionally choose only starting positions that are biased enough toward one side or the other in order to get some decisive results, rather than having essentially all draws. Humans aren't going to be able to do that. The omniscient AIs will be able to plan everything out so far, so perfectly, that they will simply know what the result will be. Not necessarily all draws, but they'll know the expected outcome of war. And they'll know the costs. And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.
Isn't the inevitable conclusion that we've got ourselves a good ol' fashioned paradox? Omniscient AI sure seems like it will, indeed, end war.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Isn't the availability of fictional sexualized content of children like lolicon one of the methods you speak of to increase costs of CP consumption (as it's less justifiable and thus more costly to pursue it at risk if there's a semi-decent substitute with far less risk attached)?
There's no economic argument for how it would increase the cost of CP consumption. It simply lessens the cost of something that some might consider a substitute.
In any event, another thing about drug prohibition is that science/society has basically no clue what actually causes the transition to being an addict (which usually comes with many harms, to oneself and others). Obviously, we know that if you never try a drug, you don't become an addict. Some portion of folks who try don't become addicted, but some portion does (this can happen via an intermediate, legal drug, too, like prescription opioids). Best as we can tell, it's pretty much a Poisson process. That means that it scales with the number of people who start using. Also, once a person transitions to being an addict, it seems that we have basically no clue how to rehabilitate them. (See Scott's old old old post about how abysmal rehab programs are.) There is a very reasonable end conclusion that we should simply reduce the number of initial users. It just seems implausible that we could flood the market with cheap, legal opioids and somehow not cause some folks to get addicted.
Similarly, lots of folks find it pretty implausible that we can flood the market with cheap fake child porn and not cause some number of people, who wouldn't have ever even started wanking down that path, to end up abusing kids.
IF we could just isolate people who were already going to consume CP and, in a targeted fashion, with no spillover effects, provide fake CP as a substitute, then sure, that'd be a plausible thing to try. That would be the like, "Give people methadone at rehab," kind of solution, not the, "Give out prescription opioids like candy to the masses," kind of solution.
Almost all CP is distributed freely so you would almost never have to figure this out unless you want really new/rare/etc. stuff.
I would be interested to know more about how this works. Seems like great risk to share, and so folks would want something in return. The indictments I have read support this, as most sites in those indictments make access contingent on regularly uploading fresh content.
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
Costs matter for some things
Awesome. I'm glad we've made progress. Start giving prices. Sometimes, they won't matter. Do it anyway. Sometimes, they matter. You can do it. Just do it.
The more expensive option is very often cheaper for the patient.
Wouldn't it be nice if they had a way of getting this information? Perhaps you could help. You could, for example, share the information that you have with them. You've agreed that you do have relevant information. We all know that it's not perfect, but it can be useful. You've agreed that you do give it to patients sometimes. Just do it.
We are often legally prohibited from considering cost or making less expensive choices.
We are talking about patient choices.
Medical care in the U.S. does not function as a market.
Mostly because you do shit like lie and hide prices. Stop hurting. Start helping.
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
You can provide them the information that you have. That includes information like negotiated prices, so they are not only looking at sticker prices.
Why are we involved when it's the insurance who decides what things costs and how much to pay.
You are both parties to the determination of price. If you don't think you're involved at all, then I will just go tell all the health insurance CEOs that they can stop getting shot by just paying you $1 for everything. After all, you're not involved at all with anything related to prices, so that couldn't change anything, right?
...or are you involved somehow?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
How NOT to Regulate the Tech Industry
Hot on the heels of my comment describing the UK's effort to finally rid the IoT market of extremely basic vulnerabilities like "has a default password", Colorado jumps in like Leroy Jenkins to show us how, exactly, tech regulation shouldn't be done. SB 205 is very concerned with "algorithmic discrimination", which it defines as, "any condition in which the use of an artificial intelligence system results in an unlawful differential treatment or impact that disfavors an individual or group of individuals on the basis of their actual or perceived age, color, disability, ethnicity, genetic information, limited proficiency in the English language, national origin, race, religion, reproductive health, sex, veteran status, or other classification protected under the laws of this state or federal law."
Right off the bat, it seems to be embracing the absolute morass of "differential treatment or impact", with the latter being most concerning, given how incomprehensible the similar "disparate impact" test is in the rest of the world. This law makes all use of algorithms in decision-making subject to this utterly incomprehensible test. There are rules for developers, telling them how they must properly document all the things to show that they've apparently done whatever magic must be done to ensure that there is no such discrimination. There are rules for deployers of those algorithms, too, because the job is never done when you need to root out any risk of impacting any group of people differently (nevermind that it's likely mathematically impossible to do so).
Their definitions for what types of algorithms this law will hit are so broad that they already know they captured far too much, so they go on a spree of exempting all sorts of already-existing things that they know about, including:
(A) ANTI-FRAUD TECHNOLOGY THAT DOES NOT USE FACIAL RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY;
(B) ANTI-MALWARE;
(C) ANTI-VIRUS;
(D) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-ENABLED VIDEO GAMES;
(E) CALCULATORS;
(F) CYBERSECURITY;
(G) DATABASES;
(H) DATA STORAGE;
(I) FIREWALL;
(J) INTERNET DOMAIN REGISTRATION;
(K) INTERNET WEBSITE LOADING;
(L) NETWORKING;
(M) SPAM- AND ROBOCALL-FILTERING;
(N) SPELL-CHECKING;
(O) SPREADSHEETS;
(P) WEB CACHING;
(Q) WEB HOSTING OR ANY SIMILAR TECHNOLOGY; OR
(R) TECHNOLOGY THAT COMMUNICATES WITH CONSUMERS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROVIDING USERS WITH INFORMATION, MAKING REFERRALS OR RECOMMENDATIONS, AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS AND IS SUBJECT TO AN ACCEPTED USE POLICY THAT PROHIBITS GENERATING CONTENT THAT IS DISCRIMINATORY OR HARMFUL.
If your idea for a mundane utility-generating algorithm didn't make the cut two weeks ago, sucks to be you. Worse, they say that these things aren't even exempted if they "are a substantial factor in making a consequential decision". I guess they also exempt things that "perform a narrow procedural task". What does that mean? What counts; what doesn't? Nobody's gonna know until they've taken a bunch of people to court and gotten a slew of rulings, again, akin to the mess of other disparate impact law.
Don't despair, though (/s). So long as you make a bunch of reports that are extremely technologically ill-specified, they will pinky swear that they won't go after you. Forget that they can probably just say, "We don't like the look of this one TPS report in particular," and still take you to court, many of the requirements are basically, "Tell us that you made sure that you won't discriminate against any group that we're interested in protecting." The gestalt requirement can probably be summed up by, "Make sure that you find some way to impose quotas (at least, quotas for whichever handful of groups we feel like protecting) on the ultimate output of your algorithm; otherwise, we will blow your business into oblivion."
This is the type of vague, awful, impossible regulation that is focused on writing politically correct reports and which actually kills innovation. The UK's IoT rules might have had some edge cases that still needed to be worked out, but they were by and large technically-focused on real, serious security problems that had real, practical, technical solutions. Colorado, on the other hand, well, I honestly can't come up with words to describe how violently they've screwed the pooch.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If competitor A lowers its price from $10 to $5, then competitor B still at $10 costs more (again relatively, but that's how people reason) even though it hasn't changed its price at all.
No. This is econ 101. In fact, in the most simplistic case of substitutes, the price of B actually goes down. There is literally no sense in which its price goes up. ("Relatively" doesn't count.)
if there were more widespread distribution of (fake or otherwise) positive/indulgent depictions of the brutal murder of puppies, do you think people would:
A. be horrified or at least strongly disapprove of it, no matter how long this campaign went on.
B. be slowly convinced via exposure that maybe murdering puppies might be fun.
You present this as if it would be an advertising campaign. That probably wouldn't work, but that's not how it would work, anyway. What would work is slowly normalizing it through the marginal people. The ones who are already a little off, a little predisposed to violence and weird, twisted shit. And if you forcibly make the people who want to shut that down desist (while simultaneously running a propaganda campaign in universities about how we should maybe be more sensitive to the reasonable needs of such people), then you're brewing a recipe for disaster.
So yeah, if we flood the market with cheap puppy murder, we're going to get more puppy murder. Some people will obviously be horrified, but so long as your propaganda campaign can at least prevent them from taking political action against the flood of cheap puppy murder, we're gonna get more puppy murder. I don't understand how else you can possibly think this would work.
You are not providing any information to the insurance company. They already get the price that you charge them (that's in the bill that you send them); they already have the negotiated price (you both agreed to it). You are providing information to your patients.
EDIT: I love how it magically changed from totally meaningless information that was complete nonsense, because the insurance company decides everything anyway and they have it all anyway.... to absolutely critical and vital information, such that if the insurance company gets even a whiff of it, it'll be an insane disaster. Like wow, dude. Listen to yourself.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
Chinese Asset in NY State Government
Linda Sun was born in China, moved to the US with her parents at the age of five, and later became a US citizen. She rose up to become the Deputy Chief of Staff for the governor. I know plenty of folks who maintain dual citizenship with other countries, but I don't know how serious the USG was/is about making Chinese nationals "really" renounce their Chinese citizenship in order to become US citizens, nor do I have any idea if Sun did/did not.
She was a subject of interest starting in at least 2020, when she was interviewed by the FBI about her trip to China. While not knowing whether she's categorized a dual citizen (which I do know, for many purposes, the security apparatus of the USG treats as synonymous with "foreign national" for many purposes) or simply a former Chinese citizen with Chinese heritage, I also don't know what the state of these sorts of FBI inquiries are. Have they become a more routine/random matter, where they just occasionally drag some folks in this category in to question them and see if anything comes up? Or did they already have some reason to be suspicious of her in 2020? Her recent indictment acting as a foreign agent, visa fraud, alien smuggling, and money laundering conspiracy includes events going back to 2015 (quite a few in the 2018-2019 years), but it's not clear at what point the FBI or anyone else became aware of any of them or to what extent they motivated the 2020 interview. NYT describes it as "questions were repeatedly raised".
This took years and a significant quantity of behavior bubbling up to get to the point where she was finally fired (March 2023). I can't currently find any details of the firing, but the NY governor's press secretary said that she was fired for "misconduct". Another year and a half, and we got an indictment. This may all be a very plausible timeline for how these sorts of things generally go.
So. Paul Manafort. He joined Donald Trump's campaign in March 2016 (when they were likely scrambling to get any sort of organization going), was promoted to campaign manager three months later in June, then fired two months after that in August, essentially immediately after Trump received his first security briefing.
To this day, there are still people (some even in TheMotte) who think that Paul Manafort is the smoking gun of Trump's culpability with Russia. That Trump obviously must be guilty for having that guy on his campaign. That it proves that "Trump's campaign" was working with Russia, and that it's Trump's personal fault.
On the other side, I personally believe that Paul Manafort and his Russian collaborators made a victim out of Donald Trump, and I can remain perfectly consistent in saying that I think that Linda Sun and her Chinese collaborators made a victim out of the NYS governments that employed her.
I think someone could make a plausible argument that both Trump and specific folks in the NYS gov't were culpable, though I probably would be pretty skeptical; as I said, I think the timeline in the Sun case is plausibly fine. But I would need an absolutely phenominal argument to support the proposition that Trump was personally culpable for Manafort, but that individuals in the NYS government were not culpable for Sun... otherwise, frankly, I would have to chalk such a position up to pure partisanship.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
you haven't produced any reasoning as to why regulation isn't a slippery slope while I can point to the development of essentially any technology since 1940 to affirm it.
I don't actually see how your argument here is supposed to function. Can you spell it out for me?
You seem ready to argue elsewhere in this thread that the very idea of the slope being slippery is ridiculous and unfounded
Nope; literally never did that. Please don't waste our time strawmanning me.
what is your positive theory of the interaction of regulation and innovation, does it have any limiting principle and how does it maintain the innovation cycle and competition in the face of the interests that inevitably act on it?
I think there is often a general sense of a regulation-innovation tradeoff. It happens in different ways in different places, and it's often area specific, many times in ways that you might not expect. It's a really tough problem, so I'm generally in favor of fewer regulations, especially when they're not pretty decently well-tied to a specific, serious problem. I think that a lot of the time, you can maintain the innovation cycle and competition by being careful and hopefully as light-touch as possible with regulation. Some examples would be that if (and this is a big if, because I would actually disagree with the ends) you want to reduce carbon emissions from powerplants or noxious emissions from tailpipes, it's better to do things like set output targets and let the innovation cycle and competition figure out how to solve the problem rather than mandate specific technological solutions that must be adopted for the rest of time, no questions asked. Of course, this is an easy example, and many situations can pose more difficult problems; I'm probably not going to have the answer to them all off the top of my head.
This requirement seems mostly focused on some of the most egregious practices, and it appears that they at least try to leave open the possibility that people can come to the table with innovative solutions to accomplish the "aspirational text" (as gattsuru put it), even if it wasn't a solution that they specifically identified. It may be possible that we have some other big breakthroughs in the field of network security that make some of these line items look ridiculous in hindsight, which is why I would also say that a grossly under-resourced effort across regulation regimes is hunting for precisely any items that may have been deprecated, so they can be promptly chopped. I lament that this is not done well enough, and it's likely one of the major contributors to the general sense of a regulation-innovation tradeoff.
I reject the concept that as soon as epsilon regulation of an industry is put into place, it necessarily and logically follows that there is a slippery slope that results in innovation dying. I think you need at least some argument further. It's easy to just 'declare' bankruptcy a slippery slope, but we know that many end up not.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
So if Wendy's halves its prices, then the relative cost of choosing McDonald's instead doesn't go up?
"Relative" doesn't count. The cost of McDonald's stays the same or possibly goes down in response.
I'm not sure what "econ 101" you took (certainly not the same as mine)
Did you literally just skip the part of the course on substitute goods?
it has zero relevance to how people actually behave in the real world.
"Igneous rocks are fucking bullshit." It always surprises me to see that people willingly choose to just deny the mathematics of economics when it conflicts with their political commitments. It probably shouldn't, but it still does.
If both taboos are equally ripe for normalization
Who claimed this? I didn't.
The question is, "What charge will you be submitting to my insurance, and what is your negotiated rate for that service with my insurance?" If there is further discussion to be had about the chance of coverage for the service being denied altogether, you should have that discussion. And potentially involve the insurance company if it could be a big deal; you know full well what a pre-auth is and when it might be useful if there is significant uncertainty about the insurance company. You're being intentionally obtuse by going on about the hospital's cost. (EDIT: You obviously know what I'm talking about, given your other answers. You already gave an example of how you can answer. You already said that you do answer sometimes. Stop being ridiculous.)
I don't care whose job it is.
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